Saturday, 18 April 2026

LIST 250 - 18/04/2026

Hello again,

Another List compiled a bit in advance and published in absentia, as work commitments briefly take me up the M18 and wolds routes to Scarborough today (Saturday).  

Whilst I graft, there must be a very strong chance that the rest of the family will while away an hour or so in the very arcade that stars in the Lande Hekt video I've shared this week.  What are the chances!  Doubt that Lande herself will still be there, but our paths will cross this coming week nevertheless, with a gig at Mary Street Live in Sheffield in the offing on Friday.

Something else for me to enjoy in my adopted home city in the coming days, alongside the snooker.

Mention of the Since Yesterday documentary last week proved more timely than I could ever have imagined, for at practically the same time as I was loading List 249, I learned that another landmark indiepop doc, My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records, has finally been made available to view on YouTube.

As you might expect, me and this documentary go back some way.  My wife and I, along with a few Sheffield, London and Bristol-based chums, were all present at its world premiere at the Arnolfini in - where else but - Bristol back in May 2014.  









(My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records launch event and exhibition - Arnolfini, Bristol 03/05/2014.  All pictures, including a solo performance by Julian Henry of The Hit Parade and Sarah Records' co-founders Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd, are author's own)


Just as expansive as Lucy Dawkins' tremendous film itself was the accompanying exhibition in the Arnolfini's gallery, bursting with Sarah Records exhibits such as posters, ephemera, test pressings, demo tapes and setlists.  Oh, and reproductions of some of the shocking, aggressive reviews to which the label's roster was routinely subjected by the worst excesses of a then frequently deeply misogynistic alternative music press.  

We've touched on these attitudes a couple of times already since That Music List came back, of course - both in the context of Heavenly's return, and last week's treatment of some of the Scottish girl bands featured in Since Yesterday.  

One of the most telling moments for me when watching My Secret World the first time (and I assume it's survived the cut) features The Field Mice mainstay and bassist Michael Hiscock being rendered almost inarticulate with disgust when invited to consider the press.  These things can live with the recipients, the victims.  

It speaks highly of Secret Shine in particular that they've been able to own the late Steven Wells' indefensible suggestion in the review for their Loveblind single, namely that they finish themselves off with a warm bath and a razorblade, rather than be crushed by it.  I'm not sure I could be that strong.

Bright, quick-moving, well put together and accessible, My Secret World is able to work its way chronologically through the 100 Sarah singles releases - occasionally diverting to consider albums, gigs, Bristol, Sarah's place in the context of late 1980s/early 1990s music and politics (and music politics), etc. - with a pleasing lightness of touch, and no small amount of humour.  

Watch for the creeping list of band credits every time Harvey Williams appears; and for Leeds' favourite son, the by 2014 Arizona-based Stewart Anderson of Boyracer (I think he's since moved to Oregon) home on the ranch.  (You might also spot me in the credits, presumably a thanks for supplying Lucy with some tape recordings of Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd in conversation with the likes of W****y and L****q.  Totally and utterly unexpected, but a very kind gesture).

Two of Sarah's very earliest singles find their way on to this week's List - the inclusion of the The Golden Dawn track which gave My Secret World entirely deliberately, the inclusion of a track by The Sea Urchins as part of our occasional Indie Top 20 reminiscence feature (it appeared on Volume 5) pure coincidence.

If three and a half decades ago isn't far enough in the past for some of you, help is at hand, with both the Isn't That...? and Straight In At features taking in the 1970s this week.  

In the case of the former, yes, it is that song off of the Easyjet adverts.  Yes, Adriano Celentano's lyrics are all made-up gibberish.  And yes, that was entirely by design, the celebrated Italian singer effectively pranking his entire fellow citizens by recording something in what sounded like slang American English at a time when Italians would go nuts for anything that was.

That's certainly one interpretation, at least.  Adriano has also asserted that the song served primarily to describe a universal inability to communicate.  Either way, it hit paydirt in mainland Europe following its original 1972 release, and the extra few quid from the Easyjet usage has probably helped swell the pension coffers of the now 88-year-old Il Molleggiato (the springy one!) and Claudia Mori, the female soloist you can see and hear and Adriano's wife of 62 years and counting.  Awwww.

It's generally the intention of Straight In At to include three or four tracks from a chart on this date in history, but as has been hinted at previously, some historic charts from eras of less volatile chart movement would see barely penny numbers of entries from one week to the next.  

Hence nothing, as originally intended, from April 18th 1971, a chart whose only two new tracks were Séverine's then newly crowned Eurovision winner for Monaco (already included in one That Music List Eurovision special not long before the hiatus) and The Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar, a track I could never abide even before I - and, eventually, the band themselves - grasped the full problematic extent of its contents.

April 18th 1976 it is instead, then, and the perfect excuse to include one of my two favourite tracks by The Four Seasons, and certainly my favourite of theirs not to feature Frankie Valli, incapacitated at the time by hearing issues.  

As a tale of fantasies and dreams tempered by domestic obligations, the lyrics of Silver Star do the job economically whilst the sweeps of the beautiful musical arrangements and shifts in time change take the lead.  Drummer and locum lead vocalist Gerry Polci's voice was never a thing of conspicuous power, but it doesn't need to be here, the effort appearing less of a strain than it did at times on the preceding hit December 1963 (Oh, What A Night) - another reason, perhaps, why I much prefer Silver Star to the last-named.

Right back to the present day, the second album from one of 2026's real stories of interest, the enigmatic microtonal duo Angine de Poitrine, landed at the start of the month and is exactly the inventive, impeccably constructed insane genius you'd hope it might be.  

I feel honour-bound to remind people, however, that really interesting French-Canadian alternative rock wasn't invented by Khn and Klek de Poitrine; and whilst fellow Quebec residents Malajube may not inhabit precisely similar experimental territory, the four albums and smattering of singles they put out between 2004 and 2012 are well worth your time.  

Proggy and psychedelic, but not forbidding; new wave-informed, but not mimicry.  It's a shame that the trail has gone cold from them for fourteen years and counting, save for a couple of solo projects.

You might also like - well, hopefully most things, but especially:

  • Tic Tac Toe, doing j'accuse hip-hop inflected pop a good few years before Daphne & Celeste (though in turn well over a decade after fellow German Susi Klinger - rest assured I'll share a track from Susi on these pages one day),
  • They Must Be Russians, a band whose location and existence predates They Might Be Giants sufficiently to have not been inspired by their name, with a delightful thrash - recorded a stone's throw from my present place of work well over four decades ago - concerning an itchy problem or two,
  • Another important northeast England mid-1990s DIY indie punk artefact courtesy of Golden Starlet, later to beget the equally fine International Strike Force,
  • Something from Ozric Tentacles to which I surrendered far too many braincells and aching limbs on Oldham alternative dancefloors during my A-Level years (je ne regrette much),
  • Something shiny and new from The Foot And Leg Clinic, who on closer inspection appear to be fronted by Arion Xenos, multi-instrumentalist in List favourites The Just Joans as well as other acts.  A gentleman with fingers in many pies, therefore - maybe that's there all the fruit went.

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 16/04/2026).




DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT

I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU


COMPILED BY CHET & BEE (AND SOMETIMES TIM)

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE

IN LOVING MEMORY: Ebo Taylor













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Saturday, 11 April 2026

LIST 249 - 11/04/2026

Hello again,

This week has found your writer once more doing what he always promises himself he won't do ever again, and that's listening out for real or perceived factual errors during one of BBC Radio 6 Music's deep dives into a year or decade rather than just enjoying the music contained therein.

This last Wednesday's romp through 1991 certainly contained a few tracks that stretched the definition of "a track from 1991".  All on You (Perfume) by Paris Angels had already been a top 100 hit in July 1990, a whole year before its final reissue; whilst Good Beat by Deee-Lite was a 1991 single from a by then heavily milked World Clique album that had been released the previous August and recorded over the three years prior to that.  Defining sounds of 1991, then?  That's open to debate.

Harder to view in any way charitably was the insistence of one 6 Music DJ during the day that difficulties, and mistakes even, in pinning a track to a year were perhaps unavoidable, due to the absence of some historic release data.  In the present day, where a resource such as Discogs in particular can offer all of the clarification required, I'm not sure that argument flies.

I can quite believe that there may be the odd song or two innocently, but wrongly, attributed in any of the many Lists I've done dedicated to a given year.  I'd suggest, however, that a national music station has a greater resource of materials and people available to it to ensure error-free research than just little old me tapping away at a laptop when the kids are asleep.

If nothing else, the week's events have prompted me to revisit the two 1991 specials I published on That Music List at the back end of 2011 as List 79 and List 80.  Both have now had their links repaired and videos embedded in the current house style, making them the third and fourth vintage Lists to be so treated.  I'd like to get round to smartening up all 236 of the pre-hiatus Lists eventually, and whilst that's obviously no small undertaking my progress on that project, fitful as it will inevitably be, can be found here.

The other recent piece of 6 Music broadcasting to attract my attention was Guy Garvey's return to the Night and Day Cafe on Oldham Street, Manchester, which clearly informed him profoundly as a musician, band member and person.  It quickly became apparent, however, that Guy and I occupy parallel universes where our gig-going experiences at the late owner Jan Oldenburg's former chippy turned redoubtable gig venue are concerned.

Not for me the nights of seeing Elbow or I Am Kloot (two acts who practically owe their existence to the place), or the production line of Oasis-alikes that the gig booker interviewed had been asked to prioritise finding for a while.

Instead, the likes of Milky Wimpshake, Sally Skull, Urusei Yatsura, Helen Love, Superstar Disco Club, Polythene, Red Monkey, Godsister Helen, Dominic Waxing Lyrical, Coping Saw, Silver Apples, Alphastone, Marine Research, Bette Davis & the Balconettes, The Yummy Fur and Lung Leg.  Several of these - plus some of the doubtless plenty more I've forgotten to include - seen on multiple occasions, and all of them seen during a golden period from late 1996 until the end of 1999 (whereafter the trips across from my by then new Scarborough base started to become a bit much on a work night).

Highlights are too numerous to mention from among those acts named, though seeing Simeon Coxe III living and breathing - and manipulating those oscillators of his - on what were still at the time the very earliest stages of Silver Apples's comeback felt particularly special.

Bette Davis and Polythene carried a barely hinged menace about them that exhilarated; the former likely to try decapitating the audience with an instrument flung at a second's notice, the latter favouring covering such stage as there was with army netting and playing guitars with vibrators.


(Godsister Helen - Night and Day, Manchester, 09/10/1997.  Picture is author's own)

The above list will confirm that Scotland's bountiful mid-late 1990s supply of acts playing angular, concise, irresistible, third wave feminism-informed, Riot Grrrl-adjacent (inspired?) indie-pop punk fare found themselves reasonably well served by Night and Day, and as well as those named, I'm sure either or both of Dick Johnson and Pink Kross played there also.  

My memories of a tremendous set there by one such act, Glasgow's Lung Leg, have been stirred again latterly by the band's successful return from over two decades' hiatus and appearance in Since Yesterday, the 2024 documentary by Teen Canteen's Carla J Easton telling the story of - as Carla herself perfectly puts it - "the Scottish girl bands missing from bedroom walls".

The stories of the past six decades finally, and deservedly, given an audience and room to breathe in Since Yesterday are frequently as depressing as they are fascinating.  

Whilst Lung Leg's own may not necessarily have been characterised by sustained financial exploitation quite on the scale that befell sixties siblings The McKinlay Sisters (for all that some of them were obliged to sell their own furniture just to eat late on in the band's original lifespan), or else by the same assumptions as regards any future plans to have children as were made of the Hedrons only fifteen or so years ago, the frustrations at the frequent trashing from familiar bêtes noires such as the NME and misogynistic promoters and bookers were real enough.   

Just as real, however, and thankfully so, was (and is) the lasting sense of camaraderie, driven by a fanzine culture of a magnitude and productivity since lost to the mists of the time, and also by the efforts of Vesuvius Records' co-founder Pat Crook (from Melody Dog) and Sally Skull bassist and gig promoter Saskia Holling.  

Annie Spandex of Lung Leg noticeably swells with pride in recalling the evening that saw three of that cohort's bands, her own included, supporting The Raincoats at the Cathouse, whilst members of many others watched on.  Validation of their "primitive fizzy pop with punk noise" (Carla's words again) from the people who really mattered.

If you haven't already guessed, placing Lung Leg's two contributions to this week's List - one of them the fine comeback single from last year - right next to a recent single from Carla is entirely deliberate.  And if you can find a way to watch Since Yesterday - there are plans to show it again on BBC Scotland a week on Thursday (the 23rd), and it pops up occasionally on YouTube - you can be certain it comes with my unreserved recommendation.

Mention of the Silver Apples in that aforementioned list of Night and Day concerts seen leads me to touch briefly on Nothing Gonna Stop by Folk Implosion, a very affectionate tribute to that legendary act - numerous of their seminal tracks are namechecked - which I'd somehow not managed to pick up on before now in three decades of owning the parent CD single (Natural One) from which this b-side is lifted.  Dearie me.

Further similar oversights on my part corrected in this week's List include the specific tracks by David Holmes and The Holloways, each of which I could have sworn went up a decade and a half ago; and no less incredibly the first ever appearance in a List of briefly prolific Shinkansen signing Monograph.

Other potential highlights among the many other goodies this week may be:
  • A return to 2010 for One Million Year Trip, the Laetitia Sadier track which endures now as then as my favourite song of that particular year.  An in parts too personal a work to warrant just being buried under a band moniker, and coming into being at the same time as stumps were being drawn with both Monade and (in the event, temporarily) Stereolab anyway, the parent album The Trip had been recorded shortly before the suicide of Laetitia's sister Noelle, to whom the album was ultimately dedicated.  What a pity that her appearance at Indietracks five years later, in support of by then three solo albums, coincided with a some of the most biblical, crowd-thinning rainstorms that festival ever witnessed - it, and she, deserved better luck.

(Laetitia Sadier - Indietracks Festival, 26/07/2015.  Pictures is author's own)
  • In what's already been a year of extensive Cardiacs and Cardiacs-adjacent activity, here's some new output by Spratleys to enjoy.  Dates for their brief autumn tour with another former Tim Smith vehicle in Panixphere are helpfully attached to the end of the video - see you in Leeds. 
  • A charting rave track whose enigmatic title was rendered in as many different ways by DJs as the horse Xaipete was by racecourse commentators.
  • A bit of Nirvana, with this week marking the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's passing.
  • Some Bridewell Taxis to finish, by way of a tribute to the storied life of their recently passed singer Mick Roberts.

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 09/04/2026).


FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 2010


THEN AND NOW: Lung Leg


IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE


RAPPING SONGS


I WAS AN ARMCHAIR RAVER

IN LOVING MEMORY: Mick Roberts

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Thursday, 9 April 2026

That Music List - Directory of Updated Older Lists

The below is a directory of all of the pre-hiatus editions of That Music List (so, Lists 1-236 from 2009 to 2018) which have been repaired since the start of 2026 on the dates given.  Broken or no longer extant links have been replaced, and clickable embedded versions of videos have been added wherever possible.  

In due course, it is hoped all Lists of this vintage will have received the same upgrade, whereafter continuous routine health checks of them all will take place.


LIST 01 - 15/02/2009
(Links last checked as all working 27/02/2026).
Includes James Yuill, Brian Eno, Wire, Sebastien Tellier, Amadou & Mariam, Fake Blood, Circulus, Trembling Blue Stars, Fujiya & Miyagi, Yumi Yumi and more.

(Links last checked as all working 08/04/2026).
Part one of a two-part 1991 special.  Includes Cardiacs, Pulp, The Field Mice, Wir, The Popguns, Gary Clail On-U Sound System, Hole, Extreme Noise Terror, Blumfeld, DJPC and more.

(Links last checked as all working 08/04/2026).
Part two of a two-part 1991 special.  Includes Poppy Factory, Blueboy, Cubic 22, The Boo Radleys, Slint, They Go Boom!!, LFO, Po!, The Fatima Mansions, The JAMMs and more.

(Links last checked as all working 23/01/2026).
Part two of a two-part 1986 special.  Includes Colourbox, Loop, Vindaloo Summer Special, The Shamen, The Wolfhounds, The Go-Betweens, The Close Lobsters, The The and more.

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Saturday, 4 April 2026

LIST 248 - 04/04/2026

Hello again,

By the time this week's List is published (and well done to me for finally working out how to schedule a publish after just the twenty years' using Blogger) I'll be in Wales.  

Not for Wales Goes Pop, alas, though those of you attending are free to make me jealous by telling me afterwards how good it was.  Prolapse, Heavenly, Lande Hekt, Pink Opaque, Red Sleeping Beauty, Stuart Moxham, The Cords, Swansea Sound, The School, Would-Be-Goods, Tulpa... I'd settle for that as entertainment any day of the week.

You've got to go back to the 2017 renewal of this festival for the last (only?) appearance there by The Just Joans, but one can assume with relative certainty that the small handful of gigs this January just gone won't amount to the sum total of their live activity this year.  Not with their first album since 2020 recently released into the wild.

From a musical perspective, Romantic Visions of Scotland is the most fully realised album in the 20-year career of Glasgow's most acid wits, the DIY recording methods of previous output eschewed in favour of a decamp to Paul Savage's Chem19 studio and the application of more strings than ever before.  

I do love the fact that the bill for this upgrade was at least in part met by Creative Scotland, an executive non-departmental public body of the Scottish government, making this an example of state-funded misanthropy.  I imagine that will have appealed to David and Katie Pope's sense of humour also.

Lead single Oh Veronica, How Right You Are, replete with David Pope reveling in the role of an obnoxious, deluded singer-songwriter in the video, kicks off this week's Session of Sorts feature.  

Among the other choices, it's a particular pleasure to be able to include a track from You Might Be Smiling Now.  Avowed lovers of fellow sardonic songsmith Stephin Merritt to the extent of covering All The Umbrellas In London and referencing his works in record titles (q.v. 6.9 Love Songs), this 2017 Just Joans long-player took matters further with a sound and delivery which to these ears appeared to pay appreciable homage to the very earliest Magnetic Fields releases.  Certainly pre-Get Lost, perhaps even pre-Holiday.  It does have a primitive feel to it next to the brand new album, but I love it no less for that.

You'll have to forgive my resisting the temptation to burn one choice on The Just Joans' calling card If You Don't Pull, as the chances are you're already more than familiar with it and there were other things I wanted to share in its stead.  

I'm amused even to this day, however, how certain of us used to joke that the Indietracks festival, if not the entire fabric of civilisation as we know it, would cease to exist and crumble into the sea if ever a year passed without someone performing it.  

The festival's de facto anthem, then, and our very own equivalent of the ravens of the Tower of London or the apes of Gibraltar.  

I first heard David play If You Don't Pull solo in front of a small but wildly appreciative gathering in the merchandise tent late one evening in 2008.  Fast forward eight years, and he and two other Just Joanses could be seen hastily rounded up and made to play said song in an absolutely rammed merch tent, thereby staving off Indiepopgeddon for another year.  Phew.

Several other appearances at Indietracks would follow; but in addition, in the band's absence, anyone else from Allo, Darlin' to Markie Popstar and Tonieee Clay (the last two named in their Indiepop Singalong capacity) would have a crack at it.  Always greeted enthusiastically.  Always sung along to lustily.  It felt like our song.  It always will.




(The Just Joans - Indietracks Festival, 27/07/2014.  Pictures are author's own)

One act whose complete absence from the entire lifespan of Indietracks long perplexed me, meanwhile, was Tompot Blenny.  

This vehicle for singer-songwriter-bassist Carl Bassett and guitarist Craig Wheatley would have fitted perfectly within the festival's musical idiom, and would likely have been known all about by the festival organisers as a very early signing to Matt Haynes's post-Sarah label Shinkansen.  

Perhaps tracking them down, however, had proven deceptively hard.  I, along with many in the indiepop scene, and even for a while their own label boss, assumed them to be based in Ilkeston, not even 20 minutes' drive from the Indietracks site at the Midland Railway, Swanwick Junction.  They could practically have jogged there.  

But subsequent Shinkansen newsletters referred to what Matt's Sarah online archive still refers to as "moves between different locations around the East Midlands with suspicious frequency"; and whatever came to pass in the interim, Carl's Bandcamp page places him a good bit further down the country in Bedford these days.

I would feel desperately sorry for them if an opportunity to play the best festival of them all had gone begging due to contact having not been established. Tompot Blenny would have been a perfect fit for the church stage or better still - as a band whose opening EP included the track Sleepwaiting For Trains, don't forget - an acoustic turn upon Indietracks' USP of the moving train carriage.

Whatever the truth of it, the fine Found Under Blankets - both the title and final track of the band's debut album - is included this week.

An elusive person also informs the final track I want to write about this week.

The song first - an endearingly daft piece of ultra-commercial French hip-hop, Tarzan samples and all, from Benny B, early-1990s staples of that Salut! magazine to which your secondary school will likely have had a subscription.  I've no idea how cool they thought they were, but as this came out over the winter of 1990-1991 the inevitable parallels with Vanilla Ice were there to be made.

And then the person. This was one of numerous Francophone tracks to feature in the Eurochart Hot 100, as the name suggests a weekly countdown of the continent's biggest tracks of the week (quantified by sales or airplay or both? I forget which) fronted by Pat Sharp and syndicated by scores of UK commercial radio stations.

It would have been about all I still listened to Manchester commercial channel Key 103 for by then (Radio 1 or Signal meeting all my other music needs), and even then solely for the foreign stuff I'd not hear elsewhere.

Evidently the same applied to one other classmate, who for a few weeks around the time this track came out would great me at school with "ehhhhh, qu'est-ce qu'on fait maintenant?" by way of an in-joke.

If he's forgotten that, he's forgiven - we're going back 35 years here. I've not seen or heard from him in getting on for three decades now, and although he did spend time in Sheffield (by amazing coincidence, at one time living in the next street along from where I now call home), I have no evidence that this remains the case.

So... ou est tu mon ami, Simon?  Ca va?

J xx


Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 27/03/2026).



I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU


GOODIER BEFORE WHILEY & LAMACQ


IN LOVING MEMORY: Dot Rotten

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LIST 250 - 18/04/2026

Hello again, Another List compiled a bit in advance and published in absentia, as work commitments briefly take me up the M18 and wolds rout...

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